Running Blind

I'm Josh Goebel, the creator of Pastie, Invoicie, and Snag the Flag. I make a living writing Rails and also dabble in photography and other geek stuff.

[dreamer3]

at Sapporo's Grill and Sushi https://www.instagram.com/p/BzRJjI1BHcQ/?igshid=1la96poh2w18w

[dreamer3]

New Blog on Jekyll

Stay tuned, this blog is about to disappear and be replaced by Jekyll (probably tomororw). All the content should be preserved and move over to the new blog automatically (except this post).

RSS feed URL is staying exactly the same so hopefully no one will need to do anything.

[dreamer3]

tztail (TimeZoneTAIL) allows you to view logs in the timezone you want - thecasualcoder/tztail

tztail (TimeZoneTAIL) allows you to view logs in the timezone you want

Where have you been all my life?

[dreamer3]

Ever used one of those fancy color palette generators? You know, the ones where you pick a starting color, tweak some options that probably include some musical jargon like "triad" or "major fourth", and are then bestowed the five perfect color swatches you should use to build your website?

What a great read.

[dreamer3]

How can Apple not realize how terrible this is that I can't even read this in Safari on my Mac?

[dreamer3]

Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage. An unusual evolution from HTML, which itself was an evolution (devolution?) from SGML, XML w...

JSON came along and wiped out XML for web apps (but did you ever wonder why we fetch JSON using an XMLHttpRequest?).

LOL.

XML didn't live up to expectations, but spending a lot of money on interoperability kinda did. Supply chains are a lot more integrated than they used to be. Financial systems actually do send financial data back and forth. RPCs really do get Remotely Called. All that stuff got built during the XML craze.

XML, the data format, didn't have much to do with it. We could have just as easily exchanged data with JSON (if it had existed) or CSV or protobufs or whatever. But XML, the dream, was a fad everyone could get behind.

A quick, interesting read and some predictions for the future.

[dreamer3]

ballercat/walt

:zap: Walt is a JavaScript-like syntax for WebAssembly text format :zap: - ballercat/walt

Walt is an alternative syntax for WebAssembly text format. It's an experiment for using JavaScript syntax to write to as 'close to the metal' as possible. It's JavaScript with rules. .walt files compile directly to WebAssembly binary format.

Glad to see someone realizing one of the big downsides of WebAssembly and trying to do something about it.

[dreamer3]

App Scams: Sneaky 'Utility' Apps Are Stealing $260, $2500, or even $4700 Each Year ... Per User

One app, WebTranslator for Safari, wants to charge you $4680 a year.

> The scam outlined above is admittedly pretty clever. I’d never really thought about it before, but the fact that the home button on Touch ID devices serves both as the “Yes I really do want to authorize this payment” verification and the “Get me out of this app and back to the home screen” escape hatch makes it ripe for abuse like this.

I don't typically hit my iPhone home button in "Panic mode" but considering this for the first time it does seem like a pretty big usability design flaw for more average users.

[dreamer3]

#photosynthesis #gamenight (at New Salisbury, Indiana) https://www.instagram.com/p/BpVj1gEAIfS/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=oow4oyphac2i

[dreamer3]

at Cave Hill Cemetery & Arboretum https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo4q8Hfg7hf/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1vppfhwa9n2uy

[dreamer3]

at Cave Hill Cemetery & Arboretum https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo4qeWMgNO1/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=rth6sx4hzbh2

[dreamer3]

#steps #stairway (at Cave Hill Cemetery & Arboretum) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo4prtOgZ0F/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=pd3up3tytdkf

[dreamer3]

#butterfly (at Cave Hill Cemetery & Arboretum) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo4paBsAzV7/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1gf0pddu969am

[dreamer3]

at Cave Hill Cemetery & Arboretum https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo4pPoXAxFa/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1qq9gfsrvum1r

[dreamer3]

#cavehillcemetery #waltonspring #louisville (at Cave Hill Cemetery & Arboretum) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo4pBZfg5yW/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1jzmeszk1629n

[dreamer3]

People Hacks for Technical Leads

Lately I’ve been thinking about, doing a lot of research on and experimenting with management strategy. As a technologist I’m inclined to…

Programmers like to talk a lot about how much they hate meetings, but pair programming is a meeting. Whiteboarding is a meeting. Lots of things that provide value and are enjoyable in the software development process are technically meetings … just with a slightly different format. Both pair programming and whiteboarding are multichannel in nature. ...

We don’t talk about these things as meetings because they don’t feel like meetings. They feel like productive work. Meetings in engineering environments suffer because they force people from activities that are usually multichannel in nature to activities that are monochannel.

Great read if you're leading a team or thinking about it.

[dreamer3]

An educational puzzle game. Solve a series of tasks where you build increasingly powerful components. Starts with the simplest logical components and ends up with a programmable computer.

The Nand Game takes you though building a working computer, starting from the most basic components. It does not require any prerequisites, in particular it does not require any previous knowledge about computer architecture or software, and does not require math skills beyond addition and subtraction. It does require some patience—some of the tasks might take a while to solve.

The game consists of a series of levels. In each level you are tasked with building a component that behaves according to a specification. This component can then be used as a building-block in the next level.

This is amazing. Played and completed it last night. XOR and full-adder were the hardest ones for me. After that it was just careful thought and dealing with a lot of concepts I was already familiar with from programming. I don't think the robot exercise at the very end added much for me, but the rest of it was top notch.

When you're done you'll actually have built a whole tiny CPU - complete with instruction fetch, decode, execute; also, small arithmetic (add, sub) and logic (lt, gt, eq, inv) units, working RAM and a few registers. You can flip the clock input on and off and watch it grind one instruction at a time.